World of Logs: Your New Best Friend (Even if the Old One Was Cool)

25092009

I decided to write about World of Logs (WoL) and then I thought I’d google it to see what others had written. Lowered Expectations has a post about it here that I recommend checking out. I’m going to try and cover some things he (she?) didn’t for the sake of variety and other good things. First things first. If you don’t know what WoL is, well, it’s like a super-expansive Recount that’s much easier to navigate. Instead of simple coloured bars with numbers attached, ala Recount, WoL graphs information out on a timeline.

DPS over time

You can get similar graphs for healing, damage taken, and other things. You can also focus in on certain areas to get a more detailed view. So with the basics out of the way, I’ll go into a few ways you can use WoL to your advantage.

Who did damage to what?

Sometimes a boss fight is less about hitting the boss and more about burst damage on adds or various other things. The best examples of this type of fight are Yogg-Saron and Freya. For example, if a melee DPS assigned to the brain room had lots of damage done to tentacles but very little to the brain, you would be suspicious and possibly investigate/ask the player what happened. As for Freya, if a DPS had no damage done to Eonar’s Gift (the trees Freya spawns) at all, you’d be similarly worried.

Don’t take this sort of thing as gospel and /gkick someone just because they don’t have the right amount of DPS to a certain target. Be sure to use WoL simply as a way to look objectively at what happened and then talk to the player in question to see what happened. Chances are there is a good reason for whatever you’re wondering about but the raider in question simply forgot to tell you or was never asked.

Who healed whom?

Healing meters are good for testing how well healers stick to their assigned targets. If you assign Healer A to Tank B but all he’s healed are other raid members and himself, you have a problem. Straight numbers (total healing), however, can be very misleading where healers are concerned.

DPS, Damage Done, Active Time, oh my!

When you’re looking at a chart of Damage Done there are three numbers on the right side, as seen here.

I'm the best!

First is DPS (damage per second). In my opinion, this number is usually completely irrelevant. As you can see, I have more damage done than other players with higher DPS. How can this be, you ask? If you get a particularly lucky streak of crits, during Heroism, say, your DPS will go up a lot for that portion. DPS as shown in the screenshot above is averaged out over the whole fight. So if you instead did really solid damage throughout an entire fight, your DPS might be lower than others but your damage done could easily be higher.

Next is Active Time. Since this is the Damage Done chart, Active Time counts seconds that the player is actively doing damage to the boss. As a result, this statistic can be misleading. Mages, or other classes who are frequently spending time casting spells, often have lower active time than melee DPS. This is because melee DPS are constantly active as long as they are next to the boss due to autoattack. Active Time is also a misleading stat to assess healers on since constantly casting heals is not necessarily a good thing. Overhealing doesn’t help anyone.

Damage Done seems pretty obvious, but it’s always worth looking into exactly what a player did damage to. Consider this example. I was in a PuG VoA (in the days before Koralon) and we had just killed Emalon. One of the rogues had about 8k DPS but if you looked at what he had done damage to, you quickly realized he had spent the entire fight casting Fan of Knives at the adds. He did lots of damage but was almost entirely useless in the big picture.

It’s also important to look at random adds that players can hit, such as Ignis’ Iron Constructs. If melee DPS are doing a lot of damage to them, it’s probably just an accident or to pad the meters. So when you look at Damage Done, don’t just take the numbers for granted.

Some things to watch out for…

WoL gives you a lot of information. If you take all of it at face value and don’t think what the numbers might mean, however, you’ll end up getting angry for no reason a lot of the time. The best example of misinformation (or lack of information) on WoL is looking at interrupts.

From this table, it seems like I sucked ass on interrupts (which, unfortunately, I actually did). But what you have to keep in mind is that you only see successful interrupts, not all interrupts cast. I definitely cast Mind Freeze more than twice, but it’s perfectly possible I only actually interrupted a spell twice. So what this information could be telling you is that the people with the highest number of interrupts were the ones who prefer to interrupt early on in the cast time of a spell rather than later (which is not necessarily a good thing, given that bosses don’t do other things while casting).

Buffs and debuffs

Another thing you can use WoL for is looking at uptime of debuffs on the boss. This is important for finding out if people are putting up the debuffs they’re supposed to be, i.e. Sunder, Expose Armor, Faerie Fire, etc. Like all other WoL information, however, make sure that just seeing a number below 100% doesn’t make you freak out. Sometimes it’s just impossible for buffs to be up 100% of the time and you should be aware of this. An example is Icehowl – with the frequency that he knocks melee around, it’d be difficult to keep debuffs on him throughout the fight.